Posts by James Green
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I will always remember him first for his association with Ernst Plischke
I saw the great Plischke exhibition at the Wellington City Gallery a few years back. I can say I was enamoured and amazed by some of his designs, which would seem quite contemporary now.
Apparently his design for a christchurch house (an L shape opening onto an internal courtyard and not addressing the street) caused an outrage at the time. The idea of having big windows to catch the sun would barely raise an eyebrow now. Sutch was clearly flirting with dangerous ideas for the time, however! I'd love to see the house (actually I tried to find it one visit to wellington). -
sitting onever-increasing arse in front of TV, pay or otherwise, is not, in fact, the best way of combatting youth obesity
Oh course P, BZP and most other amphetamines are also excellent ways to lose weight...
But seriously, and I guess this is my thought on Sabin's high school education ventures is telling kids 'drugs is bad mkay' doesn't work. After DARE first came out, some big studies were conducted looking at the effect, and found there was none. So they decided to modify the program. Still no effect. Given the number of studies which all show no effect (bar one which found DARE increased smoking) there is still no evidence for it. New education programs are always apparently somehow different, and thus apparently the null findings don't apply. Yeah Right.
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Oh yeah, and it is a stellar price. Perhaps HNZ could go into conference management as a way of funding Dot's rent or repairs?
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I usually consider myself a political junkie. But I'm so f***ing sick of this election already.
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I like the Springstein, but I'm still a fan of the HLAH cover...
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I like that Juha linked to the Homepage Hall of Shame from his blog on ... Stuff.
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the customer can plug ANYTHING in - and fires are such pesky things
to say nothing of electric chainsaws...
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I think you maybe onto something there... genius. I think it would work especially well in an election year, no?
We could even have someone dissect their evasion. "Rather than answer the question, the spokesperson brought up an irrelevant topic"
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This is one reason I'm not entirely convinced that 'zero tolerance' and 'broken windows' should be dismissed out of hand. I'm not very familiar with the reasearch, but the conclusion seems to be 'not proven to work in isolation from anything else', rather than 'doesn't work at all'.
Hmmm. Toilets are a nice 'contained' environment, that can be engineered to be relatively graffiti resistant. Ergo, it's very easy to run an efficient broken windows policy, relative to say a whole city. An interesting thought might be that 'graffiti boards', deliberately easy to write on surfaces in an otherwise hostile environment 'collect' graffiti and save the other surfaces. Perhaps councils could build nice walls explicitly for tagging?
There are so many good bits of research on this from the 70s, but there was one case where the researchers dressed up as plumbers, and inspected each cubicle post visit in order to see if any graffiti had been added. They also managed to surreptitiously note characteristics of the offenders. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get this past an ethics committee now.
Historically, women's toilets were relatively free of graffiti, and a mint 60s paper argued that this was because men graffitied for 'phallic expression', and that smoking while in the loo served the same purpose for women. Umm, yeah. Parts of the Kinsey Reports also deal with toilet graffiti as an insight into sexual behaviour.
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The 'broken windows' thing works for graffiti. At least in toilets.
A long, long time ago, I was researching gender differences in toilet graffiti, and noticed that some rest-rooms had none, while others had large amounts of 'data'. The previous research suggested that prompt cleaning reduced the overall volume, and this was borne out with some conversations with the cleaners of the non-graffitied toilets. (Blatant plug: If you wanna read the resulting article, feel free to email me for a copy)